Michael Bennet: “I would like to welcome the Presiding Officer to the Senate and just say thank you very much for your willingness to sit…”

“I would like to welcome the Presiding Officer to the Senate and just say thank you very much for your willingness to sit here this evening. To my colleagues, thank you for being here. The hour is getting late so I am not going to take up a lot of time with my own words, but I did want to come to the floor and read the words of people who have written my office, Coloradans who took the trouble to tell me what their concerns were with this suggested repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Given the fact that they took the time to write, I wanted to have the opportunity to be here tonight to read their words into the Record. It matters to a lot of people in my State because more than 600,000 people are now insured in Colorado who were not insured before the Affordable Care Act. We have had one of the largest drops of the uninsured rate in the country. We have dropped from 14 percent to 7 percent, really importantly from the point of view of saving money. The amount of uncompensated care has gone down by 30 percent. So those are at the hospital. Those are statistics, but the letters tell the human dimension, the human story that so often is lost in the Chambers of this Capitol. A letter from Kathryn from Denver who wrote: The Affordable Care Act has been crucial to my family the last several years. . . . My sister, a Type 1 diabetic since age 10, is now a Colorado business owner.…”